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I was wondering where crews and vessels for the Imperial Navy come from, and if their crews had any particular attachment to the homeworlds. How likely is it that a spacefaring culture might prefer to provide crews for the navy instead of guard regiments.
What prompted me was wanting a navy force of Horatio Nelson-esque British gentlemen with tea, drums, and stiff upper lips in space. Yes, I am aware that the praetorians exist.

Also, for the record, by referring to crew I'm ignoring the slave gangs and mutant underbelly that probably never set foot on a planet.

Mudrat wrote:
I was wondering where crews and vessels for the Imperial Navy come from, and if their crews had any particular attachment to the homeworlds. How likely is it that a spacefaring culture might prefer to provide crews for the navy instead of guard regiments.
What prompted me was wanting a navy force of Horatio Nelson-esque British gentlemen with tea, drums, and stiff upper lips in space. Yes, I am aware that the praetorians exist.

There are specific naval academies they provide the upper crewmen for Imperial naval vessels. These academies pull in recruits from all nearby worlds and molds them as fitting their teaching style. Thus you're much more likely to get traits specific to a naval academy than to a world, unless it's something really prominent.

Also, for the record, by referring to crew I'm ignoring the slave gangs and mutant underbelly that probably never set foot on a planet.

Then you've just excluded 85% of all crew, as even the mid-level non-commissioned folks are likely to be void-born.

Yeah I'd imagine that the majority of ships (aside from the admiralty/upper echelons) would be either press-ganged from planets nearby, or their own self-sustaining world entirely closed within the ship.

Given the populations of Imperial vessels, they're closer to void-going cities/hives than naval vessels we'd know.

No reason they couldn't develop a culture entirely of their own, so I'd say your idea is definitely possible

Most navy crew does not come from any planet. In 40k, spaceships are like floating cities. The crew live their whole lives aboard their ship. They are born on their ship and they die on their ship. Most 40k navy crew will have never even set foot on a planet. This goes for everyone, from the lowly slaves to the nobility that makes up a ship's officer corps. There simply is nothing that would ever require them to leave their ship.
Only really high ranking officers sometimes have need to (reluctantly) leave their ship in order to meet with other Imperial officials in person. And of course they will need to have been trained in one of the naval academies before joining their crew, making them probably the only ones on the ship to have ever seen the world outside of it. So barring the absolute top brass, naval crew will never get to a planet.
That is not going to stop you from having a very British spaceship culture though. Every spaceship has its own culture, much like planets do.

System Defense Fleets can be different however. Crews on those ships seem to be drawn from local planets and serve for short periods of time. Of course, they only stay within their local system.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Most navy crew does not come from any planet. In 40k, spaceships are like floating cities. The crew live their whole lives aboard their ship. They are born on their ship and they die on their ship. Most 40k navy crew will have never even set foot on a planet. This goes for everyone, from the lowly slaves to the nobility that makes up a ship's officer corps. There simply is nothing that would ever require them to leave their ship.
Only really high ranking officers sometimes have need to (reluctantly) leave their ship in order to meet with other Imperial officials in person. And of course they will need to have been trained in one of the naval academies before joining their crew, making them probably the only ones on the ship to have ever seen the world outside of it. So barring the absolute top brass, naval crew will never get to a planet.
That is not going to stop you from having a very British spaceship culture though. Every spaceship has its own culture, much like planets do.

System Defense Fleets can be different however. Crews on those ships seem to be drawn from local planets and serve for short periods of time. Of course, they only stay within their local system.

That's a really interesting way of thinking about it, and I think you're right

If you think about it, there are actually many many different human empires that collectively make up the Imperium. You've got what everyone thinks of as the Imperium (planets, hives, IG regiments etc.), then you've got the Ad Mech (Forge Worlds, tech guard etc.), then you've got the SM chapters, then you've got the Imperial Navy (almost entirely voidborn led by the admiralty, sort of like mini Imperial craftworlds).

Neat

Many thanks for the replies everyone. I think my solution is to have the initial officers trained at an academy of pure britishness, which has become the culture of that ship. As we descend to the lower decks the britishness can degrade to other stereotypes. Wonderful

Perfect!

The lowest decks can be Ozzies from 'down under'

The lowest decks can be Ozzies from 'down under'

Nah mate, us ozzies are the ones on the ground being blown up by you spankers. The lower decks are the irish (or maybe the welsh).

The lowest decks would ofc be those guys you can't understand on voice comm even if they're technically British. Some sort of chavs and the like?

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Most navy crew does not come from any planet. In 40k, spaceships are like floating cities. The crew live their whole lives aboard their ship. They are born on their ship and they die on their ship. Most 40k navy crew will have never even set foot on a planet. This goes for everyone, from the lowly slaves to the nobility that makes up a ship's officer corps. There simply is nothing that would ever require them to leave their ship.
Only really high ranking officers sometimes have need to (reluctantly) leave their ship in order to meet with other Imperial officials in person. And of course they will need to have been trained in one of the naval academies before joining their crew, making them probably the only ones on the ship to have ever seen the world outside of it. So barring the absolute top brass, naval crew will never get to a planet.

This does not hold up to scrutiny and does not agree with the BFG and Black Library sources. Imperial starships rely on at times on a lot of manual labor and conditions are hazardous, resulting in deaths and maiming on a regular basis even without the casualties from combat. Imperial starship populations are not of a size that they can replace such from births on the ship. For example, the BFG novels state the Dictator class cruiser has a crew of almost 13,000. Andy Chambers, creator of BFG, gave a scale on the old BFG list of 1,500-2,000 crew per damage point, with transport capacity of 1/3 to 1/2 their crew size. That translates to a total maximum of about 24,000 for a cruiser size vessel. The entire volume of the ship does not need to be made into a flying ghetto. The depictions both written and visual portray ships with areas of "wasted" space like vast cathedral spaces or decks where nobody goes routinely, where stowaways, mutants, or cultists can hide away. Things like fuel tanks, storerooms, and vast blocks of black-box machinery take up volume without requiring people be crawling all over them all the time.

The Black Library novels that delve more deeply into space combat show a lot of the general crew are press ganged from planets. That is the only way the ship can replace the attrition that it inevitably suffers. Once they are on a Navy ship, they may potentially stay there the rest of their lives, but certainly the vast majority of them do not originate from the ship. The officers may come from noble families with a history of service in the Imperial Navy, but they too ultimately come from planets, not the ship itself.

There are far more written sources by GW and BL adhering to the Andy Chambers scale than not actually and they are remarkably consistent (for GW) over a number of years. Lest someone try to raise sources with vastly inflated crew numbers, those were written by writers that obviously did not do their research on the existing background and scale and just made things ludicrously big just to be big, and such anomalies stand out precisely because they are so inconsistent with the rest. It is analogous to those writers or artists that made Titans bigger than whole mountain ranges even though Warlord Titans for example are given as well under 50m in height, and FW Titans are clearly not the size of walking mountains ranges.

Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060514065138/http://www.wolfedengames.com/battlefleetgothic/crew.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20120411182934/http://www.wolfedengames.com/battlefleetgothic/lances.htm

The following quotes are from BL books written years apart by differing authors yet they all are using or are close to the Andy Chambers crew size scale:

Now, six years later, he was one of the most senior non-commissioned officers amongst a crew of almost thirteen thousand... (of a Dictator class cruiser)
p. 62, Shadow Point , by Gordon Rennie

Admiral Rutger Augustine look out over the vast length of his flagship vessel, the mighty Retribution-class battleship, Hammer of Righteousness...Six kilometres from stern to prow...
p. 31, Dark Disciple

Over 25,000 crew called the warship home, even though a sizable chunk of those were slave labourers and servitor wretches... (for a grand cruiser)
p. 95-96, Soul Hunter